Actually it seems most Windows people use SourceSafe since it comes included with the MS dev tools.It isn't great, but neither is CVS.

It seems that good version control systems are either WAY overprices (clearcase), or nobody actually uses them.

Subversion looks to be the one that has a chance of taking over the outdated and terribly poor CVS system. But as with most open source un*x oriented software it seems to be impossible for any normal person to get set up and working. (Will the Un*x nerds EVER learn?)

Actually it seems most Windows people use SourceSafe since it comes included with the MS dev tools.It isn't great, but neither is CVS.

It seems that good version control systems are either WAY overprices (clearcase), or nobody actually uses them.

Subversion looks to be the one that has a chance of taking over the outdated and terribly poor CVS system. But as with most open source un*x oriented software it seems to be impossible for any normal person to get set up and working. (Will the Un*x nerds EVER learn?)

Beg to differ...there's at least one excellent free easy-to-setup modern (unlike CVS which is decades old and just as crap now as it was back then) SCM for unix - Vesta.

You can access the repository from windows (instructions on site for using Samba to make it appear in the Windows Network / filesharing), but you need NFS to checkin/checkout source. And to get it to compile. Also, you need a unix/linux machine to actually run the server on - installation

Interesting, never heard of it.. but since it isn't properly accessible from Windows and requires unix I would never run it. Though if you are a un*x-only shop then it could be wonderful.

Microsoft has made their Windows-NFS client freely downloadable as of Jan this year - so the only thing (theoretically) needed to get full checkin/checkout access on windows is to recompile / port the checkin/checkout binaries (it's open-source on SF.net).

In practice, I'm one of those who'd rather run a mile than compile any C++ code these days (too many bad memories, too much pain everytime I recompile a linux kernel, which is the only regular C++ compilation I do these days). So I understand your POV. Although...it's rather sad that the world's best free SCM doesn't have windows binaries because no-one's ever bothered tyring this .

NB: the original and main developers are chip-designers at Intel etc, where they simply don't use Windows for development - hence they've never tried porting it.

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If only Subversion was written in pure java and could be started with "java -jar subversionServer.jar"

Wish ditto for Vesta. But I'm not about to singlehandedly try to convert an enterprise-level SCM from C++ to Java (!).

From all the people I've spoken to in commercial games studios, SV seems to be the best bit for "I wouldn't touch unix even if you paid me" shops. I've bitched with a number of people who I know well enough to trust their opinions, and seen them go through CVS (argh!), PerForce (everyone likes it, no-one can afford it), SV and a couple of others. Where price is no concern (i.e. at the really big places) there seems no reason not to use PF (although when we last used it 90% of the admin tools had no GUI!); for those that have to worry about costs, SV keeps getting the thumbs up. Haven't met anyone yet who's given up on SV...although I am trying to convert a few to Vesta. I know some who are very obviously tempted...

Oh, and there's AlienBrain. But I won't repeat the words usually used to describe that (don't want to risk accusations of libel).

subversion wasn't that hard to get setup, especially if you just use it's own server and not apache. Getting all the mod_dav stuff to work with the correct library versions was the more difficult part. but once you do it is nice being able to talk to your repository behind the corporate firewall.

NFS - I wish I had a clue about it.. I know it is some networked file system thing... but not having seen it in action (probably because I would have to use Linux and it would involve a few weeks of setup - trust me it WON'T work first try for ME )

Not sure if my Mac supports it... probably being BSD based...

but still the whole idea of having to set up so many OTHER things to get it to work is a major deterrent. That's why I won't use SubVersion either. At least with SourceSafe I run the installer and then it just works (not well of course, but it does the job). Notice how that procedure doesn't involve any other setup.. not configuring this and that, not starting this normally hidden service, no digging up some half tested Microsoft hack -- oh wait that IS SourceSafe , never-mind

However, FYI NFS is part of the unix core - it's like TCP/IP. So unless you have a custom hand-made kernel, NFS is "automatically on". It is about as simple as FTP, except explicitly designed for LAN file sharing. It's what MS and IBM copied (gross simplification, but..) to make windows-networking - excpet they added passwords and stuff. NFS is *merely* the file transfer and changing directories etc. You create network shares just by writing the path that you want to share in a text file. That's it (although you can add basic permissions checks, and deny hostnames etc too).

The main reason people have for not using it is that the main implementations (lead by Sun IIRC?) were written entirely to use UDP, which always struck me as a bad idea, and lead to lots of bad situations if your LAN was under heavy usage, and lots of hard-to-maintain code. IIRC the intention was to provide the highest possible throughput.

Also, the fact that it doesn't have network user accounts, and doesn't share printers etc, means that's it too basic to interest people - especially since IBM came up with NETBIOS etc (which MS then took over).

So everyone uses something else to maintain network user accounts. MS uses the Windows Domain Controller system for NT4 + 5, and then the Active Directory for NT 6. Unix systems today tend to use Kerberos (which is just a distributed user-account system with strong security) which MS are starting to use too, or else use the very old and outdated NIS which has weaker security and lacks some of the good ideas in Kerberos but like NFS is very very common and pretty simple.

I have Suse 9.0 installed at home. And I have this mac laptop.. so I should be able to share files easily between them... I tried Samba - but that wasn't such a good idea, since Samba on OS X and Samba on Linux didn't like each other. I opened a folder and then I had to manually enter my username password for once EVERY file in the folder, just to get a listing. They may have fixed that by now...

SO I should try NFS... accept where is the interface? On Windows I right-click on the folder and choose "share" - pretty simple eh! Is this another case of digging seventeen layers into the file system hierarchy so I can guess at a cryptic file name and fill it in with cryptic parameters?

SO I should try NFS... accept where is the interface? On Windows I right-click on the folder and choose "share" - pretty simple eh! Is this another case of digging seventeen layers into the file system hierarchy so I can guess at a cryptic file name and fill it in with cryptic parameters?

Well, you know how critical I am of such stuff, so I don't need to say anything in that regard. Suffice it to say that the NFS howto for linux tells you almost everything you need to know - but also suggests you use commandline options which if you DO use it breaks silently. It seems if you just google for the howto and follow it but ignore any "special" options and flags then it Just Works. There was some stuff about turning it on (I think for security reasons it was off by default?) you might need to lookup; but it was like turning on other kernel stuff - takes about 10 seconds.

Doing searches for man pages and howtos, I found that if you've ever used your "hosts" files (on windows or linux) you've already half configured NFS, since it uses them for much of it's config (the permission stuff).

The key file on the server is "/etc/exports" which is pretty simple. Some distros install this file with a comment at the top giving examples how to use it. Otherwise just do "man exports". It's bascially a list of directories, and a list of what permissions you're allowing e.g.:

/files/games 192.168.0.* (rw)

or something like that, to say "let all 192.168.0.xxx machines have read-write access to my /files/games directory".

And you have to start/restart the NFSdaemon. Something like "/etc/init.d/nfsd start".

Personally, I'd give it a try if you're stukc using FTP or other less-than-convenient systems right now. If it works it'll probably work first time.

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